Even after extensive quality assurance testing, embedded systems in-field also fail and need to be debugged. Moreover, often the failure is not something that can be easily reproduced in a laboratory environment, so we are left with production, often hardened, systems to debug.

Assuming we have designed our system with the aforementioned scenario in mind, our first debugging choice is usually to extract as much information about the failing system, for example, by obtaining and analyzing a core dump of the misbehaving processes.